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Firefox on the iPhone, Kinda

Mozilla’s Firefox Home iPhone and iPad app has been approved by Apple and is ready to grab from the App Store. Yes, you read right. Firefox is ready to use on iOS devices, but it’s not quite what you might think.

Firefox Home is not a full browser — indeed, the Mozilla Foundation has no plans to make its own rendering engine for the iPhone. Instead, it’s primarily a way to sync your Firefox desktop browser history, bookmarks and open tabs to your iPhone. You can use it as a browser, but instead of Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine it uses the same speedy, built-in, Webkit engine as Safari.

It also takes a lot more setting-up than the built-in solution. To sync bookmarks with desktop Safari, you just check a box in iTunes. By contrast, to get Firefox Home working you need to follow a ten-step plan, involving installing sync plugins into desktop Firefox, making up passwords and inventing a “secret phrase”. Worse, you get this caveat in the instructions: “Note: The initial sync may take up to 24 hours.”

Once you have managed that, everything is automatic, and the iPhone app refreshes every time it is launched. It could be very handy for quickly moving the web-page you are viewing over to your iPad, but otherwise it seems kind of clunky. Still, it is at least free, unlike Safari. Wait. No. What?